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It Still Isn't Very There Here
Tuck in your shirt, chew with your mouth closed, make a billion dollars
By ERIC ELLIS
September 9, 1999
Web posted at 12:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 12:30 a.m. EDT
Returning to a shell-shocked Asia after almost three years of reporting the Great Internet Land Grab from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I am often asked by locals with dollar signs in their eyes: "What's the funkiest startup you've seen?" and "What's the difference between there and here?"
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These are good, tough, relevant questions. And difficult to answer. To the first one I am tempted to say the obvious: Yahoo! or eBay or Hotmail. Their success at executing good ideas is famously self-evident. And to the second: Education and freedom are clearly touchstones in a liberalizing Asia.
But in speeches and talks to wide-eyed Asian listeners, I reply that I am hot for "application companies," those that create a corporate use from some ingenious software someone else invented. And that glibly leads me to Etiquettesurvival.com, which operates out of the very nerve center of Nerdistan, Palo Alto.
Etiquettesurvival.com answers both of the above questions. It was created in 1996 by former British model Lyndy Janes and Apple Computer refugee Sue Fox after they recoiled at the appalling table manners of Nerdistan's accidental billionaires.
Netscape's 1995 IPO created an international buzz around the Internet that still hums. And it was Netscape's Marc Andreessen, the geeky Wisconsin fatboy with a penchant for canned spaghetti and the social skills of a buzz saw, who became Nerdistan's pinup. Suddenly, every bespectacled video-arcader wanted to be Andreessen, eating habits and all. An oft-heard statistic while I was in Silicon Valley was that the Bay Area and Seattle (where Microsofties multiply) were the America's biggest consumers of pizza, Levi's and triple lattes.
But 20-something innocence was soon lost, and slick Wall Street bankers and polished Euroexecs were ringing to request meetings and perhaps "lunch" with horrified geeks. While the nerds were thinking McDonald's, the bankers were angling for Wolfgang Puck. Enter Lyndy and Sue, whose $200-a-person classes take students through basic business-lunch taboos like buttering bread, slurping, belching, putting your elbows on the table, just using a fork and eating with your mouth open. I kid you not! I sat in on one class with a crowd from emerging multinational Adobe Systems--and passed, I was happy to tell my mother.
It's a growth business. Silicon Valley is now the world's most economically active place (surpassing a rueful Asia in mid-'97), and international flights into San Francisco and San Jose, the valley's "capital," dump foreign deal-makers at record levels.
How well is etiquettesurvival.com doing? Well they haven't gone public (yet), but I recall self-styled Bond girl Janes was driving a smart German marque. And that was 15 months ago. Of course they engage in e-commerce: they sell instructional videos online.
So what's the difference between here and there? It's more than just table manners (though Lyndy and Sue might envision opportunities after witnessing the buffet racing at some of Asia's smarter hotels). My point in the age of the Internet is that invention is not entirely the key to success. Amazon.com's success is built around refining and cheapening an inefficient retail structure, in this case books and beyond.
One of the best Net companies I've seen in Asia so far is the simplest. It's an Amazon-like office supplier with no shop front, near zero inventory and a few staff. Just because the Internet was invented in the U.S. doesn't mean that dominant U.S. companies will naturally be successful in Asia. Internet spend and content is mostly local, and a home-grown Weboffice.com speaks to Asian consumers more than does, say, a U.S.-based Staples.com, unless the latter develops an Asian infrastructure.
And the Asian businessman, because his economy has traditionally been about making and supplying for the world, generally knows more about it than the average American one. Put another way, I once asked John Doerr, the famous Menlo Park-based venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, who seeded @Home, Amazon.com and Netscape, among others, if KPCB would apply its successful American model elsewhere.
"Yeah," he said, in all seriousness. "We're planning to open an office in San Francisco," 50 km up the Ferrari-clogged 101.
Despite the fabled fact that 25% of Nerdistan programmers are ethnically Asian, the truth is they work in the main for U.S. companies, and America remains too obsessed about its own emerging market to give major consideration to Asia.
That means there are vast opportunities for Asians to stake Internet territory at home applying and adapting the better ideas while leap-frogging some of the mistakes and missteps made (understandable in a new arena) in Silicon Valley. Including better table manners.
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